


leave this troubled world behind

by perennial



Category: Eastern Promises (2007)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Post-Canon, Post-Movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-17
Updated: 2015-05-17
Packaged: 2018-03-30 21:49:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3953005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennial/pseuds/perennial
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She took it for granted that he would not die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	leave this troubled world behind

**Author's Note:**

> every now and then the things i lean on lose their meaning  
> and i find myself careening into places where i should not let me go.  
> she has the power to go where no one else can find me  
> yes and to silently remind me of the happiness and the good times that i know
> 
> [james taylor - something in the way she moves]

She always took it for granted that he would not die, so when she sees his face on the television, a grainy photograph above a screaming caption, her first thought is an illogical denial— _He would have told me._

She spends every free moment scouring the internet for information. It is breathtaking, what he has managed to do in under five years. Not that the articles say it—they blacken his name far darker than they ever did to either of his predecessors. The man she encountered during their brief acquaintance, however, the man who saved her daughter and her uncle and probably her, too, that man’s fingerprints are all over this. He has weakened all four legs and the house has come crashing down. His last act is the greatest triumph the world will never hear of.

Desperate hope whispers that he might have faked it, surely he faked it, a man like that doesn’t just _die_. A man like that doesn’t just _let_ himself die—and then she thinks of all the hazy clues she pieced together and remembers that a good man who will sacrifice the lives of good men in order to achieve his eventual end, that man will not hesitate to sacrifice himself. His whole life has been a sacrifice; why not his death?

When the police release pictures of the body, missing fingertips and recognizable facial features but complete with tattoos Anna maybe remembers, she calls in a favor from a friend in Medical Records. She painstakingly compares the two sets of images, searching for any deviance, wondering who else might be doing the same. They are a perfect match. She does not say much for the next few days. Her mother casts worried looks her way.

But what finally does it is the sudden lack of what she calls their guardian angel: the watching presence that has followed her and Christine for the last six years. She has never known whose men they were, his or the Yard’s, though she suspects his, as there was no apparent point to it once Semyon was behind bars. It rattled her and she spent weeks trying to evade them until her mother pointed out that if someone wanted to hurt her or Christine they would have done so already. They could not do anything about it so they got used to it, to the point where Anna will wave or smile to the empty air—because she cannot help herself; because Christine is always safe and she appreciates it; because she wants them to know she is no fool.

Now the guardian is gone. The void creeps up on her, just like the watching presence did. Nothing in her life is changed, except that her shadow has vanished. The world seems wider and sharper.

The last time she saw Nikolai was at Semyon’s trial, sitting in the crowd with Kirill. She watched him without appearing to. The only time he looked at her was when she delivered her carefully scripted testimony, and the lack of welcome in his face chilled her so that she could not look at him again.

She goes into Christine’s bedroom and watches her daughter sleep. In the faint glow from the nightlight Anna finally acknowledges the hopes that she has kept secret even from herself: that he would shed the _vory v zakone_ and come to them, that they would share a life together, that he would be the father she desperately wants for her child but (perhaps selfishly) has given little effort to seeking in other avenues.

They barely knew each other. She does not even love him.

_But I could have._

He died on Christine’s birthday. There is a message in that, she knows. A man like that, a man who has covered his body in messages for those who know how to read them, does not plan to die on whatever number the calendar proffers. They are the only ones who know the date’s significance. For a span of days the birth of this one baby had swept like a tornado through their lives, days of fear and anger and pain, throwing them together, forcing choices they had not wanted to make, bringing hell to earth, breaking their hearts deeper. And when they landed she had a daughter in her arms and he had Semyon’s head, and suddenly this baby had sent their lives down two new roads, running parallel and distant. No, he did not die on the day of Christine’s birth by coincidence.

Her grief feels strange. She does not know what, exactly, she has lost. He was not a vital part of her life. He had been an important part of it, briefly, and then had faded out like a sparkler flare come to its end. Most of her grief is sadness for him: that the life he might have lived, a happy one surrounded by people he loved and who loved him, was ripped from him violently and was replaced by one of lies and loneliness. That he lived with so much pain with so little to soothe it. That he could not enjoy the triumph and peace he deserves so much credit for (the upheaval amongst the mob contingent features in the news for weeks—Scotland Yard is hauling them in by the barrel).

Raising a child on her own means that the months she planned to stay at her mother’s have stretched into years. Helen watches Anna but uncharacteristically says nothing; she makes pot after pot of tea and caresses her daughter’s head briefly with every cup she carries to her. Anna is grateful for both the comfort and the silence. It is not the first time she has been given them. Even now her memories of that night at the river come alive in nightmares that wake her, heart racing and sheets soaked in sweat. Countless nights—especially that first year—have found her awake in the kitchen, a mug cupped in her hands, the sight of her mother washing dishes or folding laundry at three in the morning serving to slow her pulse and send her back to sleep with a quieted mind.

Anna supposes the nightmares will stop now. Any lingering threat is gone. It is all over. The guardian angel is gone; there is nothing left to protect them from. There is no protector to give the order.

He is dead and it is over.

Or so she thinks.

o   o   o

They go to work and school. They shed coats and scarves and welcome the warmer days. Forgotten bulbs poke pale green heads up through the dirt. The Khitrova women pack picnic baskets and kites and make a second home of the park.

In July a postcard arrives. The picture on the front is of houseboats on a canal; there is a bridge full of bicycles and a café embedded in the canal’s stone wall, the street above rimmed with tall old trees. The caption says Amsterdam. The only thing written on the back is the classic tourist’s _Wish you were here!_ It is addressed to Anna Ivanovna.

Only one person has ever called her Anna Ivanovna.

She refuses to think about it. She hands her boss her holiday notice and does not think about it. She buys the plane ticket and books the hotel room and does not think about it. She hugs and reads to and bathes and feeds and teases and kisses her daughter and refuses to think about it. She feels like a gull skimming over the wavetops, who cannot allow herself to plunge into the depths until the moment demands it; for now, she must be all forward motion.

She picked a late departure time so that she could put Christine to bed before leaving. The flight is spent refusing to think about it, but worrying nonetheless. What is she walking into this time? Is anyone following her to him? The city is wide awake all night and the muffled noise of nightclubs weaves into her shallow sleep. Her dreams are blurred and unsettling things and it takes a slow morning over a full pot of strong tea and a long, hot bath to exorcise the impression they leave.

The concierge at her hotel knows the café on the postcard. She wanders down sunny streets and over wide bridges, and the breeze that accompanies her serves to clear her head and lift her spirits. She is in a commercial district, the road lined with rows of small shops and restaurants, cut through by the canals that link through the city like a vast spiderweb. Cyclists whir past her; tourists clump together around maps; chattering passerby flit past her on unknown errands; flowersellers smile at her from stalls awash with color. She almost forgets why she is there, when suddenly she arrives.

The café is on the other side of the canal. She is standing where the postcard’s photographer must have, for there is the bridge in front of her, and below her is a line of moored houseboats. The breeze ruffles the green leaves far above her and the water shines in the sunlight that manages to sift through the trees and land on it.

Looking her way is a man sitting alone at a table. A stream of cyclists cut between her and the sight. When she looks again he is standing. She grips the rail.

_Alive._

He raises one hand in greeting. Her feet carry her across the bridge and down the stone stairwell that leads to the café patio. He is still standing, waiting, and when she nears him he steps forward. She is hypnotized by the movement of his body—the rise and fall of his chest—the undeniable, unquenched life in his eyes. She has not wholly believed it until now.

“The locals here kiss in greeting,” he says with a believable English accent that takes her by surprise. He holds her arms above the elbows and rapidly kisses the air next to her cheeks, left-right-left. Then he is holding out her chair, and she is sinking into it, and he is ordering from the waiter who just appeared at their table. She does not speak Dutch but he does with evident fluency. She wonders what he has been doing for the last seven months.

He settles back in his chair and looks at her. He seems remarkably at home.

She asks, “Have you been here every morning, on the off chance I would appear?”

He looks amused.

“No. I asked for a favor. They flagged your passport. I knew the moment you got on the plane.”

She wonders what he did for them, to be owed favors by the sort of people who control international travel.

His hair is cropped short and he has not shaved in a month. His voice is new, softened into her familiar English pronunciation, though she can hear the current of Russian underneath and he still occasionally confuses the grammar. The tattoos on his fingers have been removed. He wears a white oxford, so she cannot guess how much more ink is gone, but even those small places are significant. So it is really over. He is really starting over.

For a while they say nothing, just hold their drinks and watch the play of sunlight and shadow on the water. Life is bizarre, she thinks. Nightmares and daydreams always coming true in quick succession.

She feels his eyes on her.

“You have questions.”

She shakes her head. “Not really.” She does not want to know the details of how they set it up. Except—“Why am I here?”

He only watches her, the hint of a curve at the corners of his mouth.

“How is the baby?”

“You ought to know.”

He chuckles.

Anna sips her tea, looks at him over the rim, waits.

“I wanted—to see,” he says, a half-explanation, but—

She puts down her cup. “Me too,” she says.

He does not smile when he tells her, “You may regret it. I have been a bad man for a long time. I know not much about being a good man.”

“Bullshit.”

His eyebrows lift.

“You can pretend all you want,” she says. “I heard you hesitate.”

His expression turns questioning.

“When you walked away from us that night, to follow Kirill. I heard you hesitate at the steps. You didn’t want what was waiting, even if it made you king, even if it led to everything you’ve accomplished since. You wanted us.”

He does not speak. She stares into her teacup, trying to get her breathing to even out. Why doesn’t he answer? This is what has tied her to him for six years. If he denies it she will be crushed, unmoored, a boat swept out into the maw of the open ocean.

“Let’s get out of here,” he says.

He stands abruptly and waves a banknote at the waiter before laying it on the table. He climbs the stone steps up to the street level, then plunges into the crowd on the sidewalk without looking to see if she is following. She catches up to him, almost jogging at his side, and he does not look at her or speak to her and she is beginning to wonder if she has, indeed, made a terrible mistake, when he grabs her hand and links his fingers through hers in an iron grip.

They weave quickly through the throng, avoiding shopping bags and bicycles, rushing to a destination she cannot fathom—until the road curves and there is a small break between the shops and he pulls her into a slender alley, empty and wholly unnoticed by the passerby. He pushes her against the brick wall and puts his hands right where her neck and jaw meet and for a moment he looks at her, just looks, his eyes tracing her face in a way they have only once before; but that was a farewell, and _this_ —

His kiss is scorching, hot and urgent and uninhibited, and his intensity takes her breath away. She can feel his pounding heartbeat, feel the trembling of his hands. His weight pins her against the wall. She wraps her arms around his neck.

Her whole world narrows to the point where his tongue moves around hers, his head dipping low to fit his mouth to hers more closely, the heat of his whole body heating hers. One of his hands moves to the back of her neck and the other holds her waist. She feels as though she is melting, as though she is disintegrating and blowing away, as though she is burning everywhere that is touching him.

At one point he laughs a little, breathlessly, and she realizes he is happy. It takes her back to the night at the river, when his kiss was gentle and his forehead against hers was the most intimate thing she had ever felt. It makes her pull him closer, kiss him harder, so that he will know how glad she is that it is him, that for six years it has somehow only been him.

She could not say how much time passes before they pull back slightly and look at each other, their breathing ragged. For a while they only stand there, holding each other and catching their breath. She leans her forehead against his collarbone and smiles against his shirt.

He twists the ends of her hair gently with his fingers. She turns her head and kisses the side of his neck, then hugs him tightly and leans back. He runs his thumbs over the edges of her jaw and cheekbones and she lays one hand flat against the side of his face and looks up at him.

He tells her, “I can’t go back to London. The next place is Sydney, Australia. To stay.”

She processes this, trying to picture upsetting her life and Christine’s to join him, what it would mean. Her thoughts are like water running over the pebbles in a brook, unable to settle after that kiss.

“Now I show you Amsterdam,” he says, “and you think about Sydney later.”

o   o   o

“Christine, darling! Not so far.”

“She is fine,” he says. “She is a good swimmer. I teach her very well.”

“You taught her to be too bold.”

He grins. “She already have that from you.”

She swats him and calls him cheeky. He only laughs, and picks up her hand and kisses the back of it.

She has often wondered, privately, if it was his cheekiness that saw him through the years of hell he put himself through. The weight he carried was heavy, and might easily have sunk him but for his smart mouth and the careless attitude he wore, which saw him safely through situations that would have been the death of an angry man—or given him away at pivotal moments when he could not help caring and needed an outlet, a way to say no.

Their neighbors know them only as the Watsons. Christine has adjusted with ease, aided by sweet new schoolfriends and her newfound love for the unceasing sunshine, which she embraces with both hands. Anna is a nurse at Macquarie University Hospital. Nikolai works at an auto repair shop and introduces himself as Nick.

He is slowly becoming the man he might have been, had his world not been turned inside out and he not taken on a single, dedicated purpose half a lifetime ago. He does not trust it yet, this peace. Neither does she. But right now they have it, and they are grateful for it. It is their unspoken agreement to live every day with all the happiness they can give it. When they talk about the future it is only Christine’s they discuss.

He is as gentle with Christine now as he was the first time he saw her, and it makes Anna love him more, to see the love he has for her—their—daughter. She is amused to see Christine’s face changing, adding his expressions to her repertoire, whereas before her face was mostly Anna’s. Like now, the fierce scowl she gives them as they walk toward her that is meant to be a challenge to the attack she knows is coming—and she is right: Nikolai breaks away from Anna and charges at the girl with a roar, scooping her up and spinning her around in the surf, her scowl turned to shrieks of laughter. He is laughing too, and he falls backwards with her into the water, allowing her to dunk him, emerging sputtering and smiling.

He rejoins Anna and they walk down the beach, Christine before or behind them with a bucket in hand as she searches for seashells. It is not quite the horizon Anna had pictured as a girl, dreaming of white knights and the white-picket kingdoms they would carry her off to. Life is bizarre, and always will be. But his hand is warm around hers and Christine’s freckles are dark from the sun, and the ocean air is sweet on her tongue.

**Author's Note:**

> Is it really a sequel if no one dies? I don’t care.
> 
> *final scene inspired in part by skazka’s endnote on “I Will Be Free” (I don’t know how to link things in endnotes) (by in part I mean originally they were going to go skiing)


End file.
